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they won't be on airlines...Unless you have a disconnected, completely stupid terrorist

We had the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the UK liquid bombers, all after everything got locked down after 9/11.

They are obsessed with airplanes. If they had any sort of body count quota and intelligence, they would clearly try other targets.Even just arriving at the airport, you'd think they would realize, "Hey if I drive a car through this line I can kill more people than with this stupid little bomb in my underwear," but they don't!

It's almost as if their end goal is to make air travel inconvenient.

Inconvenience must be the reason. I don't think they knew the allocation of resources would be as unbalanced as it is. Heck, if they did, there are so many other things they could have targeted at the same time as the airlines to start the next police state situation.

I see, so the terrorists successfully using planes, and not protecting aviation, would lead them to what, precisely? Declare victory and go back to bothering the locals? Hold news conferences showing their superiority and stating there's no need to use planes again? What exactly do you propose to do when a hole is found in security? State unequivocally that this was an isolated incident and the American people can feel confident that their government is not worried?

What are you sounding defensive for? I agreed with you.

My addition was that planes were used; protection went in place after planes were used. It's in place. Use it. Quit expanding on it. Use your intelligence, money, and time to find out what else the bastards can use and set up watch-and-stop points. Be creative (like they would). Protect those assets.

Example: I'm a known wealthy Fortune-100 business owner. My home is broken into by a very smart group of robbers who had inside information (they've been to my home directly or indirectly before). They broke in through the basement service access door and found a way in to my house through the HVAC system. When this happens, I don't holler to the public that I have an emergency because people found a way to get into my house and steal money (and detail it); I stay quiet. I also don't focus only on the security of the method they used to break in. I take care of the weaknesses that allowed them to get access and I'm DONE WITH THAT. That's it. No more focusing on that. I move my focus to OTHER methods people can use to get access and start to take care of those. For instance, I take care of there not being glass-break sensors on my alarm system and also place motion sensors in the areas I'm most concerned about in the home (plus the pathways use to get TO those areas). I also take care of the lack of lighting on the rear of my house. I talk to my neighbors and inform them I was broken in to (but tell them it was no big deal), and ask them to watch over the parts of my house they can now see with these new lights. I'll throw in a free mowing of their lawn or an annual monetary gift for their good neighbor status. IF people somehow find out that there was access to my home using the methods and pathways that were exploited, I don't focus my attention on that pathway and keep on adding new features to it as well as stupid ones that make me look completely paranoid. The actual problem has been dealt with; I don't need to look like Mr. Power by focusing on all of the security additions on this one little maintenance door and announcing a new thing I fear can be used to break the security. I simply state that the problem has been taken care of and maybe even thank the ones who broke in for pointing the weakness out. If anyone wants to come after me to prove they can "do better than those guys" or "use the same method that worked for them", they will get caught.

And yes, the government stating that things are under control is how it's done. Otherwise, there would be civil unrest and riots constantly. What you do is tell people that there was a hole found in a system, the issue has been addressed, please go back to your normal lives and don't live in fear.

Your text looks like you don't have an idea and you feel helpless. If you stop butting heads with people and try to work toward a solution, you'd be surprised how much more can be accomplished in a shorter time frame. If you want to keep arguing to make me feel helpless or ignorant, keep replying. It will get you nowhere because I have control of my emotions and knowledge. We all should.

I agree with you 100%. But keep in mind, (especially male) Americans are raised to believe that they are always the "best" and will always be the "winner", no matter what. There is no such thing as "losing" a fight. It's impossible for most males to admit they are "wrong". They can only go as far as to say they were not given all of the information necessary to make the correct decision, and even then that is a bit of a stretch because they must know everything at all times. Which is one of the stupidest things I started to believe when I was being raised as an American.

A better idea would have been to not react violently, but to make a public statement that we appreciate the work the terrorists have done to point out the weaknesses in our system (that have been corrected as of the time of [that] statement).

It would lure out the testosterone-angry ones and make them easy to find and catch. The others wouldn't know how to proceed because they haven't heard such a statement before. But what do I know? I'm just an idiot that thinks instead of operating with my balls' chemicals.

Wait, if we didn't attack back, the terrorists would have cut off oil supply to the world, right? Because the rest of the world would just accept that instead of destroying them on a 10,000,000 to 1 basis, right? Psh. I've said enough.

We know that, the story was old years ago. The real question I don't see asked often enough and answered even less is: What does it have to do with? Why do they do this bullshit, and why does it get more transparent? Why have we reached the part where even regular people begin to understand the TSA is full of it?

Is it just stupidity? Really? While you shouldn't always look for malice, there's also a point where stupidity ceases to be the most likely explanation.

The simple fact that a discussion like this comes up proves that the terrorists have already won, big time. The hundreds of billions of dollars that the world spends on "preventing" terrorist attacks is much more than the terrorists could have hoped for. They damage the economy, not by destroying buildings or killing people, but by making us spend an obscene amount of money in useless "anti-terrorist" measures.

We should stop all this. We should just hop on a plane and fly. Fuck the terrorists.

You're right; and because the biggest terrorist attack in this country involved planes, all future attacks have to involve planes, right? TSA has a stupid fear quelling operation that makes them look really dumb, not one that protects. And you're right with your first statement. They FEEL they have won, which only strengthens their feelings of superiority.

You will never stop stupid people because stupid can't be fixed. Once that one realizes that correlation != causation, you have a chance. Until then, you can only introduce the facts and hope for the best. It's tough to stanch meme propagation when the propagators are teary-eyed mothers with dead children. But it has to be done.

I remember when cellphones base-stations were being maligned as being totally cancerific (that's a mother-of-schoolchildren science term), the response to a "there's no connection, all published results say so" claim by the big companies was "therefore they're not publishing the stuff that proves our claims - it's a coverup" from the anti-sciencoids (that's a worked-for-a-basestation-manufacturer mild insult).

These mothers were unable to explain why the local Nokia R&D site had a massive base-station *right in the middle of it*, and how that would fit in with their consipiracy coverup theorem.

You can't argue with idiots whose minds are already made up using *any* language.

No kidding. Case in point:My grandfather stood (with many other soldiers) in front of microwave radio transmitter directed cones (dishes) to warm themselves up in subzero temperatures. They didn't really wonder how or why it worked at the time.

Guess how many died from cancer as a result? Out of a group of 30-something guys, 10% died from *A FORM* of cancer.

<snark>Omg that's so much higher a percentage than the number of people that have not undergone that bodily microwave heating</snark>

HAM radio guy. Atmospheric / weather guru. Visual-spatial master w/ recent resection of seizure causation area in the left hippocampus. Now the compensatory enhancement of the left side is emphasizing even further the extensive content-base of the right, like never before. If that doesn't make sense, try this one: A smart guy with deep social skill. Was an adult at 7 years, now 31. Do the math;)